I got off the phone and my mouth was dry. I don’t know how she did that to me. I swallowed. I needed to put on some Chapstick.

I drove to her place after work. Lucky for me, it’s on the way home. I don’t have a single Melissa Ethridge cassette in my truck, but all I could hear was “I wanna come over. To Hell with the Consequence...” I turned on the radio to try to drown out my thoughts. It wasn’t working.

I jumped out of my truck and pulled a little pedicure bath out of the bed. Funny, the things people donate.

She came to the door wearing a short black skirt and pink strappy shoes. They had three inch spiky heels and shaped her foot down into ten delicate toes. I am not a girly girl, not in the least. I don’t keep track of all those girly girl things. I don’t have shoes with three inch heels and I don’t have feet that taper down into nothing. I tried not to stare. What the hell was I doing?

She knew what I was doing. She knew what I was there for. She was going to let me play with her feet in warm, sudsy water and pretend she was mine. She was going to let me mull the fantasy over in my mind. I wasn’t sure why.

We ran the water until it was about 105 degrees and I filled the basin. I put the water on the floor before her. She was sitting at the kitchen table. She had a little stool for me. There were towels and clippers and files and pretty pink polish all laid out. She crossed her legs. Her ankle went into an angle that was dangerous territory. I felt the pull of lust and abandon.

I could take her if I wanted.

I’m not sure that made it easier or not. I mean, she knew I was watching her. She knew I was checking her out. She knew I was taken. I tried not to think about it.

I found the outlet and inserted the electrical cord. She handed me lavender bubble bath and I poured a little into the water. The basin started to bubble.

“I haven’t done this before.” I told her.

“It’s okay. I have.”

She held up her foot, and I took off her sandal. I moved it down into the water. “It’s not too hot?”

“No.”

I took her other foot and slipped the second shoe off. I wanted to hold her foot for a long time. In another life, I would ask her to point her toes, then straighten them back again. I would hide behind the one-way mirror at the Shoe Emporium, six inches off the ground. I would watch breathlessly as she changed footwear, from boots, to mules, to blue satin slippers. I envied the satin slippers especially, but when she put on the thigh highs and zipped them up the side, I wanted to watch her walk. I would masturbate while I looked on.

I eased her left foot into the water along with the right. Now what?

“I usually read a magazine for awhile while my feet soak.”

“Okay.”

She picked up a magazine and started to flip through it. In doing so, her legs parted and from my vantage point, I could see everything. She wasn’t wearing any panties. She obviously shaved. All but for a little patch on the edge of nothing. I cleared my throat.

“Something wrong?” She scootched up in her chair and looked down at me where I was sitting between her legs. For a moment, she pushed her legs to the left, then the right as she adjusted in the chair. Show over. Maybe she hadn’t meant to do that.

“Oh no,” I said. Best to act like we’re both innocent. “It’s good. All is good.”

“You want to read something? You need to give it a few minutes so they get soft in the water.”

“I’m fine,” I told her. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted her to open her legs again. I wanted to lose myself in the pinkness of those folds and just imagine parting them with my fingers, my tongue, the angles of my cheeks, my nose. I wanted to inhale. I wanted to swallow. I wanted to stare.

“Can I rub your calves?”

“Of course.” She giggled again. “You’re so silly.”

Her calves were smooth with alabaster skin. She shaved, not waxed, and I could feel the tiny hairs in certain areas. She picked up a bottle of baby oil. I held out my hands and small pools formed. How could her legs get any softer? I rubbed my hands together then spread the oil across her skin. I probed for tension. There wasn’t much.

As I massaged her calves, she sighed a little bit. She parted her thighs again, and this time, I wasn’t imagining that I could smell her.

Even beyond the soft baby oil smell and the fragrance of lavender, I could smell pussy. I imagined her taste, like cotton sheets and red apples. I so wanted to be there, lost inside those folds. What would it take to make her cum?

I took her right foot up out of the water and started to massage her toes. She handed me a jar of gook. “Put that on my callouses,” she said. I noticed that when she passed me the jar, her elbow hit her breast in such a way to push them together and bulge up and out of her low-cut knit top. God, she had great breasts! I could just imagine how soft and giving they could be, like pillows and clouds.

I opened the jar and another smell joined us in the room. The salve was thick with sea salts and almond paste. I spread the paste across her toes. Just smelling the almonds made a headache I didn’t know I had disappear. I raised her leg a little so I could smooth the paste across the sole of her foot. I couldn’t tell where she had callouses.

When I raised her foot, I was so tempted to just lay back on the floor and look completely up her dress. I mean, it was there and all, but some was left to my imagination. When I moved her foot around, the stretch of the dress got in the way, then back again. I wanted to ask her to take the damn thing off. But then, if she’d done that, I wanted to get naked too, and to press her up against me.

“Other foot,” she directed. She eased her right foot back into the bubbling pool.

I got another dollop of the salve and took her left foot. Now this was the angle! From here, I didn’t have to imagine. I could see the bump of her clitoris. I could imagine the pulse of it against my tongue. I could see the depths of her vagina. Fingers could slide inside. Neck muscles would strain. Toes would clench. I spread the paste across her foot and under. I imagined my whole body under her weight and how she would feel bouncing against me.

She handed me a towel. “Now dry and file.”

Dry and file. Dry and file. I didn’t begin to know what I was doing, but if there was anything I was good at, it was faking it. I could fake that I didn’t care this much, that I didn’t want her this badly. I could fake that I wasn’t looking inside her crevice at that moment and wasn’t imagining venturing there. I could fake that I didn’t want to know exactly what she tasted like after she came. Dry and file.

Her toes were small. At least compared to mine. At least compared to the other five fat people that I’ve been with in recent years. Fat? Maybe that wasn’t fair. It was mostly their ankles that had been fat. It was mostly their heads that had been fat. Fat with dissidence and drama. Fat with the discouragement that comes with one more broken dream.

I filed her toenails. I soaked them and dried them one more time. I took the nail polish and read the name on the bottom of the glass. “Pink Pearl Persuasion.” Were all nail polishes named like bad lines in a romantic poem, full of alliterative phrases and nuance?

I handed her the polish. “Could you shake this for a moment, while I separate your toes?” I tried to think of any other context where that sentence could possibly make sense. There wasn’t one. I watched her breasts jiggle as she gave the bottle a good shake. I found the tangerine toe separators. I forced toes around foam to shape them in a way that they could be painted without mussing up the polish on the next one over. I tried to imagine who had come up with such a thing. After all the other scents, the smell of the polish was sharp and abrasive. I painted her toenails with deft, pink strokes. I had to stop thinking about her pussy in order to accomplish this.

“Top coat next.” She handed me another vial.

I painted one more time. This time, when clumsy intentions pushed some all over the side of her toe, she said, “Just leave it. No one will see and it will wash off tomorrow.”

“Now we wait,” she said, as soon as the shine was applied.

I unplugged the basin and rinsed it in the sink. “Where do you want me to put this?”

“Can you keep it at your place? You’ll come back again, won’t you?”

It was sheer torture just being in her presence. I thought about that swollen pussy with just a trace of hair up top. I thought about that crevice and that slit, that nub above the end of it, where it all came together. I thought about her feet and how her ankles moved in those pink strappy heels.

“No problem.”

Author's note: I have a girlfriend who is very butch and her life partner is a female I work with. I gave her this story because she so has the hots for me and she has a little shoe fetish... her partner would kill her if she got caught acting on her feelings. Hmmm. So far she is still alive. <g>